[Finally got around to requesting Seasoned Writer role, so now I can post here sometimes, too. Below is a small introspective work on Neviro that I thought about after reading his journal. Enjoy.]
One of Neviro’s earliest memories was that of fire.
Fire that consumed everything – searing and scorching heat which burnt down all he held dear to him in one fatal moment. His father, a stoic figure with a hardened look beyond his years, lay on the ground as flames lapped at his body; that immovable mountain of a man who never once shed a tear when he recounted the fall of his homeland to his children, now screamed his voice hoarse with all the energy he had left, telling his son to flee. Neviro never once saw his father weep, but he did – in those last moments before his mother tugged him away – see true and desperate humanity in his father’s eyes, before he never saw him again.
Fire consumed everything that would have been his, his father once told him. Mere months before Ravenna sent dogs after their scent to squander the last of Winterveil’s royal blood, his father told him everything, as he once told each of his other children. His father watched fire consume all that he held most dear, watched great stone towers topple with flashes of blinding light. His father watched his own father die at the spear of one who bore a crown decided greater than his, and his father watched that same fire consume his home whole, slaughter his siblings one by one – each strong in their ability to produce magic laid to waste like bugs beneath the bronze tipped booth of this apocalypse-bearing flame.
He had never seen that fire for himself, but he knew the flames left its marks on him. From the moment he was born he felt the burden of the scars his father bore even if they didn’t mark his skin. When they sought for one who inherited a piece of his grandfather’s power, when they pushed him into learning old Winterveilian techniques that have since been lost to time – it was as though they feared fire would take him too.
It never would, thankfully. It would only take his father, instead. And he would run from that fire for most of his life. Even if it drifted him away from his family and left him floating on some foreign cloud.
It was only when he landed on that foreign cloud did he soon find himself chasing down that fire, with the strangest assortment of people. Most would scoff at a deposed prince being part of the schemes of two nobodies and the embodiment of an explosive about to go off, but these would be the very people that would lead him to face the fire that took his father.
He wishes he could say that he fought that fire valiantly, avenged his father in cold blood and took the bronze crown forged in the flames that burnt down a homeland he never got to know.
But he was weak. Too weak to face it even with the training he did to walk in his grandfather’s footsteps. It took barely a hit for the heir of tyranny to knock him down on his knees, and force him to watch a complete stranger avenge his family, his country. A stranger did the job he was sure his parents would have wanted him or his siblings to do. That in itself left the bitter taste of ash on his tongue.
When he was carried down from Ravenna’s royal castle, he watched it scramble in their wake. That which took everything from his people had been all but snuffed out. And all that remained was left on the shore of its kingdom, a spark just waiting to ignite and begin hundreds of years of hatred anew. Neviro watched the young man, Revon, curse the stranger who fulfilled his duty. The stranger only looked on for a moment, a ceaseless and silent battle waging behind their eyes, before they took the wheel from their quartermaster. Neviro knew that the stranger was no fool. Revon, though a mere shadow in comparison to his brother, would take that mantle and wear the crown if he had to, and it would lead to a whole kingdom on their tail, keeping them from facing greater evils beyond the Bronze Sea.
Perhaps at one moment, when they sailed to the canyon island of Wind-Row, did Neviro consider sailing back to Ravenna to finish the job; to wipe Ravenna of its stained royal bloodline, just as its founder once thought to do with fire and death. In that regard would he have finally fulfilled the vengeance his father must have sought in running away. His family would be free to walk again, and he could return to his mother stronger in her eyes.
He watched the fire they had stoked in their camp as he contemplated his next move. They needed rest, the lot of them. The curse user had been gravely injured fighting one of Ravenna’s generals, and the redhead had been fighting off half an army by the time they all reconvened. In that period of rest, he weighed his options. What good would vengeance do to a country that has been gone for a generation? What good would the innocent lives of that man’s brother and his children bring, when it wouldn’t bring back the rest of his family?
The Bronze Seas were a better place without the fire that burned inside its late king, but perhaps what lay inside its younger Prince could be different. So long as there was someone there to kindle it into something new.
When the avenger of his family awoke, Neviro approached them – he wouldn’t join their journey into farther seas just yet. He had unfinished business in Ravenna, one that he hoped would usher in an age of peace for the Bronze Sea. Only after would he rejoin them, perhaps stronger and more worthy to be called Prince to Winterveil.